Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China: Changing State-Society Relations

By Beibei Tang

Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China examines the key mechanisms operating at the grassroots level in China that contribute to urban development and increased public support for the legitimacy and authority of the Chinese state. Beibei Tang uncovers new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance since the 2000s to reveal the significant factors that contribute to regime survival.

Tang introduces the concept of hybrid authoritarianism, a governance mechanism an authoritarian state employs to produce governance legitimacy, public support, and regime sustainability. Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space between state and society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and in this context, ultimately strengthens CCP leadership.

Tang documents processes of hybrid authoritarianism through her focus on various types of urban neighborhoods, including new urban middle-class neighborhoods, and the increasing urbanization of the countryside. Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China provides a conceptual framework that avoids scholarly approaches that tend to reify either one-party autocracy or Western-centric notions of democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501769283

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Cover: Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China, Changing State–Society Relations by Beibei Tang

GOVERNING NEIGHBORHOODS IN URBAN CHINA

Changing State–Society Relations

Beibei Tang

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Diversification of Neighborhood Governance

2. Intermediary Governance Space

3. Neighborhood Conflict Resolution

4. Neighborhood Service Provision

5. Participation in Neighborhood Governance

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

This book is based on research conducted during the past decade, for which I received much research support from several institutions and many colleagues. The Australian National University (ANU) where I worked previously and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) where I work now both offered generous support, an encouraging research environment, and an inspiring intellectual community for the research projects I undertook.

The research projects that I conducted during my time at ANU (2010–2015) contributed to half of this book. At various stages of my research, I received valuable mentoring, encouragement, inspiration, and help from my colleagues in China studies, sociology, and political science. My heartful gratitude goes to John S. Dryzek, Luigi Tomba, and Jon Unger for their guidance and support over the years, which contributed to the intellectual foundations of this book. I would also like to thank my colleagues Nattakant Akarapongpisak, Ed Aspinall, Greg Fealy, Tamara Jacka, Ben Kerkvliet, Andrew Kipnis, and Sally Sargeson for their intellectual and professional inspiration.

In 2015 I moved to XJTLU in Suzhou, China, and joined the Department of China Studies. Thanks to David Goodman’s invaluable mentoring and academic leadership, I managed to further develop and complete this book. Under his leadership, the Department of China Studies at XJTLU has become an exciting multidisciplinary research hub. This book would have been impossible without our stimulating intellectual community and the research funding support provided by XJTLU.

Over the years, I received valuable constructive comments and suggestions from other colleagues around the world: particularly Baogang He, Yingjie Guo, and Dorothy J. Solinger. I also benefited enormously from the encouraging and constructive comments received from the three anonymous reviewers, which helped me refine and strengthen my arguments.

This book includes excerpts from several of my articles and book chapters, reprinted with permission: Grid Governance in China’s Urban Middle-Class Neighborhoods, China Quarterly 241 (2020): 43–61; Intermediary Governance Space in Relocation Neighbourhoods, China Perspectives 2 (2019): 57–65; Deliberation and Governance in Chinese Middle-Class Neighborhoods, Japanese Journal of Political Science 19, no. 4 (2018): 663–677; Neighborhood Aged Care and Local Governance in Urban China, China Journal 79 (2018): 84–99; ‘Not Rural but Not Urban’: Community Governance in China’s Urban Villages, China Quarterly 223 (2015): 724–744; Deliberating Governance in Chinese Urban Communities, China Journal 73 (2015): 84–107; The Discursive Turn: Deliberative Governance in China’s Urbanized Villages, Journal of Contemporary China 24, no. 91 (2015): 137–157; and Wujiang in Transition, in Suzhou in Transition, ed. Beibei Tang and Paul Cheung (London: Routledge, 2020), 214–232, reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa PLC.

I would like to thank Jim Lance at Cornell University Press for his belief in this book and his tremendous encouragement, guidance, and support throughout the whole process. I am grateful too for Clare Jones’s detailed and clear instructions and help in the production process.

My mother has been the cornerstone of our family. This book is for her.

Introduction

THE STRENGTH AND FLEXIBILITY OF NEIGHBORHOOD GOVERNANCE IN URBAN CHINA

At 10 a.m. on January 23, 2020, two days before the Chinese New Year, the Chinese government announced a lockdown of the city of Wuhan, with a population of more than ten million due to the frightening emergence and spread there of COVID-19. Within a short time, pandemic prevention and control became a nationwide priority for all levels of government. The entire country applied tough measures to control population movement and prevent social gatherings. In the next two months, most Chinese cities became isolated from each other with the temporary closure of public transportation and highways. They canceled public celebrations for the Chinese New Year, closed shops and restaurants, postponed the start of schools and work, and forbade all kinds of social gatherings. All those living in China at the time experienced six to eight weeks of mandatory isolation at home imposed by the government.

How did the government manage to apply all these restrictions on its population of 1.4 billion? The answer lies in the most local and basic governance unit of Chinese society: residential compounds and neighborhoods. In Chinese cities, it was the residential compounds (shequ) that carried out pandemic prevention and control measures, together with local police and staff from government offices. Across the country, government employees accompanied by property management company (wuye gongsi) staff went to individual apartments to check residents’ information and body temperature. They also monitored residents’ outdoor activities, checking people and cars coming into the residential compounds and denying the entry of visitors. Resident volunteers and resident Communist Party members joined them to facilitate service deliveries to the residents and to pass on information about government policies and regulations to individual residents (CCTV News 2020; The Economist 2020). Neighborhoods, as always, became the frontlines of complicated urban governance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Through an analysis of new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance in China since the 2000s, this book examines the key mechanisms currently operating at the grassroots level that contribute to the regime survival of an authoritarian state. After more than four decades of China’s economic reform, the party-state’s control of political power shows no signs of weakening. Rising inequality, corruption, social tensions, a crisis of ideology, and political repression observed during this period have led to heated debates, especially among scholars outside China, on whether and to what extent China is going through a regime crisis. Surprisingly, to date most studies show that the Chinese party-state still manages to receive strong public support from the majority of the Chinese people (e.g., Nathan 2003; Chen 2004; Chen and Dickson 2010; Chen 2011; Tang 2016). Empirical studies adopting different analytical approaches have revealed the consistent finding that Chinese citizens are generally satisfied with the Chinese central government. And this satisfaction, to a large extent, is the source of public support for the current regime, despite their discontent or anger toward local governments.

For the Chinese party-state, as noted, the pervasive reach of the state is considered an effective way to interact with citizens and avoid large-scale social unrest that may jeopardize the economic development and the stability of the regime. As a result, the state apparatus extends to all levels, from the national parliament to workplaces to the private realm such as residential compounds. At the grassroots level, both workplaces and residential compounds house agencies of government offices and party branches. The abstract concept of the state is encountered, felt, and experienced daily in urban work units (danwei) and neighborhoods. Since the 2000s, China’s development of a market economy and urbanization of the countryside have profoundly transformed the ways through which the Chinese party-state reaches, responds to, and interacts with its citizens. Overall, with the demise of the public sector’s control of urban housing, different types of urban residential communities associated with the economic means of their residents have become the common scenario in Chinese urban life since the late 1990s. Chinese grassroots governance, in turn, has experienced unprecedented changes in institutional setting, personnel structure, work tasks, and governance dynamics. During this process, urban neighborhoods have gradually become the cornerstone for new state–society relations and the most influential and basic government unit (Bray 2006; Heberer and Göbel 2011; Read 2012; Tomba 2014).

Focusing on new trends of neighborhood governance in urban China, this book introduces the thesis of hybrid authoritarianism to illustrate how and to what extent important social and political mechanisms play out through everyday politics and generate public support for the Chinese party-state at the grassroots level; it also explores what impacts these mechanisms have on Chinese political life in general. In this book, I define and elaborate on hybrid authoritarianism by (1) emphasizing the unchanged ruling style of authoritarianism; (2) focusing on grassroots-level governance practices characterized by diversity, variability, and adaptability, especially relating to the involvement of non-state actors and different forms of governance practices; and (3) highlighting the effects of those practices/measures in generating regime legitimacy and popular support under tightened political control. The hybrid authoritarianism thesis developed in this book addresses the topics of state–society relations and governance in reform-era China systematically, rather than exploring the isolated governance innovation practices documented by most existing studies.

Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space connecting the state and the society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and, at the same time, strengthens the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It operates through everyday politics within a defined political territory at the grassroots level. In Chinese cities, that defined territory is the neighborhood—usually translated as xiaoqu (small residential area) or shequ (residential community)—marked by both geographic and administrative boundaries. Depending on the number of residents, one shequ can cover one or several residential compounds. In other words, residential compounds are spatial units with physical boundaries, whereas shequ are administrative and governance units for the urban population residing within a defined residential space. In this book, the concepts of neighborhoods and residential communities are used interchangeably to refer to the territorial features of residential complexes and the political functions of shequ.

The unique political functions carried out by urban neighborhoods include implementing policy and government programs, carrying out administrative duties, establishing social networks, and exercising social control among the residents (Bray 2006; Heberer and Göbel 2011; Read 2012). Political life in Chinese urban neighborhoods is largely organized by a Residents’ Committee (jumin weiyuanhui or juweihui), the agent of the party-state at the grassroots level; it is supervised by the Street Office (jiedao), which is the lowest level of government in the urban state apparatus. Through this kind of governance neighborhoods, the party-state has established and enhanced what Heberer and Göbel (2011) call state infrastructural power at the grassroots level. In the past two decades, along with changes in social, economic, and political life in the PRC, neighborhoods in Chinese cities have become a more complex political arena accommodating not only the agents of the party-state such as Residents’ Committees but also emerging non-state actors and organizations, such as market groups, which include property management companies and remaining village collective organizations; neighborhood service providers including social organizations (shehui tuanti or shehui zuzhi); and civil groups including homeowner associations, resident groups, and resident volunteers. Altogether they constitute important political intermediaries that are positioned in between the party-state and society and that facilitate interactions, negotiations, and sometimes collaborations between the two. As this book shows, neighborhood governance in the past two decades has incorporated key elements of hybrid authoritarianism that embrace governance issues directly or indirectly, use both authoritarian and relatively more democratic methods, and work to achieve governance outcomes aiming at both the party’s domination and the growing participation of civil society.

The hybrid authoritarianism thesis is born from the increasing complexity of Chinese society produced by two major economic and social transformations since the 2000s: the further development of Chinese market reforms that began in the 1990s and the urbanization of the Chinese countryside, which has become a nationwide initiative in the past two decades. Marketization and rural urbanization have transformed not only economic operations but also the social interactions and political participation patterns of Chinese society. As a direct result, those reforms produced two substantial social classes in Chinese urban society today: the middle class and landless farmers. These two groups have new economic, social, and political interests because of dramatic changes in property ownership; their interactions with the party-state are critical in shaping both state-society relations and regime stability. In turn, they form important class bases for political life in Chinese urban society, which is characterized by a mixed form of political rationality combining both conventional political conditions and new governing apparatuses (Sigley 2006).

To date, there has been an important trend in most English-language studies of the PRC that is rooted in a framework of contentious politics and considers the state and Chinese society as two opposing ends of the political spectrum. The hybrid authoritarianism thesis takes a different analytical angle: it focuses on everyday politics taking place at the grassroots level in the form of nonconfrontational daily interactions between the party-state and citizens. China’s intensive economic and social reforms have resulted in a remarkable change in state–society interactions in which citizens have begun to negotiate directly with the grassroots government presence (Cai 2010 Chen 2011; Tang 2016). This has significantly influenced mechanisms of grassroots governance, which in the previous socialist period had exerted control largely through work-unit governance (Walder 1986; Lü and Perry 1997). This book investigates how the Chinese party-state responds to new governance issues stemming from marketization and urbanization at the local level by carrying out governance in different ways for different groups of the urban population while securing the CCP’s leadership role across society. This is not to deny the importance of regime-level analysis or the study of contentious politics. Instead, it aims to increase understanding of contemporary China by showing how public support is generated at the grassroots level. Neighborhood governance shapes institutional settings, produces political actors, develops political actions and strategies, and generates political participation, all of which are very important for higher-level politics and regime legitimacy at large.

Marketization, Urbanization, and Urban Governance

In this book I explore these key research questions: What strengthens an authoritarian regime’s resilience at the grassroots level during economic liberalization? How does the Chinese party-state respond to governance challenges and secure its governance legitimacy at the local level? How do citizens experience and interact with the state in a socialist market economy? These questions gain urgency from the increasing heterogeneity of the urban population and their relations with the party-state produced by a series of critical reforms regarding property ownership, such as urban housing reforms and rural land expropriation. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, privatization and commercialization of urban public housing produced a nation of homeowners who purchased apartments heavily subsidized by their socialist work units. Official statistics reported that the homeownership rate in urban China reached 89 percent in 2010 (NBS 2011c), and another Chinese survey estimated that it was 85.4 percent in 2011 (Yang and Chen 2014). Studies in the Pearl River Delta found that in the mid-2000s, lower-income households owned their homes at nearly the same rate as middle-class households (88.9% versus 91.4%). Nearly 11 percent of middle-class households owned two or more properties (Liu 2018). In 2017 sales of residential buildings made up around 85 percent of the total sales of commercialized buildings in the country (NBS 2018).

Around the same time, urbanization of the Chinese countryside occurred with the expropriation of rural land for commercial and urban residential projects. Official statistics suggest that China’s urban built-up areas expanded 4.6-fold from 1985 to 2015 (NBS 1986, 1996). The national urbanization rate rose from 18 percent in 1978, to 36 percent in 2000, to 59 percent in 2017 (NBS 2018). This urbanization came at a cost, producing at least 52 million landless villagers between 1987 and 2010 (Ong 2014), and by 2014, this number was estimated to reach 112 million (Zhao 2015). The Blue Book of Cities in China (2013) argues that the landless villagers made up nearly 30 percent of China’s urban population by 2012. An official report showed that the permanent urban population increased three times between 1978 and 2015, reaching 770 million in 2015, 56 percent of the whole population (Gu 2017, 4).

As a direct result of marketization and urbanization, Chinese urban life has experienced diversification of the urban population with varying socioeconomic statuses, which determine the neighborhoods they reside in. Those social and economic transformations have been accompanied by rapidly increasing and widespread social tensions across the country. There has been an impressive surge of collective incidents (quntixing shijian) since the early 1990s and in various types of disputes (Shen 2007; Tang 2009; Gallagher and Wang 2011). According to the Ministry of Public Security, there were 10,000 incidents of social unrest and protests in 1994 (French 2007), 87,000 in 2005, and 180,000 in 2010 (Orlik 2011). In 2010, around 11 percent of the total population lived in protest-affected regions, of whom about one-third were directly or indirectly involved in some form of protest (Tang 2016, 109). Chinese urban neighborhoods have become a contested ground for new governance issues, a variety of governance actors, and governance strategies and methods.

How the party-state responds to those new governance issues and how those responses are communicated to the society on a daily basis are essential for regime survival and sustainability. As Wenfang Tang correctly points out, this type of situation requires a highly responsive government: in an authoritarian political system where competitive elections are missing, the government struggles to maintain its political legitimacy by responding to public demand more quickly than in an electoral cycle. (Tang 2016, 2). Since the 2000s, the party-state’s responsiveness has expanded from regime institutionalization (Yang 2004; Tsai 2006; Landry 2008; Shambaugh 2008) in terms of adaptability, complexity, autonomy and coherence of state organizations (Nathan 2003, 6) to a wide range of governance practices and discourses that can also significantly help produce social stability and regime survival, particularly in authoritarian regimes (Art 2012). Those include adapting globalization (Nathan 2006), increasing foreign direct investment (Gallagher 2005), keeping corruption under check (Manion 2004), employing informal institutions to facilitate formal institutional change (Tsai 2007b), co-opting capitalists (Chen and Dickson 2008), switching governance strategies from restricting movement of the rural population to subsidizing the countryside (Wallace 2014), and policy changes addressing protesters’ grievances (Heurlin 2016).

This book expands existing national and subnational level analyses to explore whether the party-state’s responsiveness at the grassroots level indicates relatively more tolerance on different issues, is more inclusive of participating groups, and is more efficient organizationally. For example, the discourse of stability maintenance (weiwen) has been facilitating local disputes because of inadequate and ineffective legal conflict-resolution methods and the state’s ambiguous attitude toward mediation (Benney 2016). Despite being a top-down governance approach, the influential and widespread discourse and practices of stability maintenance are accompanied by an increasing freedom of local officials and, in turn, greater space for local autonomy and flexibility in employing diverse methods for conflict resolution. As a result, local experiments are becoming widespread, particularly at the neighborhood level. Every day, neighborhoods accommodate various actors and direct political interactions between citizens and the party-state regarding unprecedented governance issues, yet China has not yet developed a strong civil society. On the one hand, neighborhood governance must deal with a high degree of diversity associated with specific living environments and varied individual and collective actors. On the other hand, neighborhoods are required to carry out standardized governance tasks requested by higher levels of government. To cope with these sometimes contradictory challenges, new governance mechanisms and trajectories have emerged in Chinese urban neighborhoods. The hybrid authoritarianism thesis aims to capture key mechanisms of this complex polity by focusing on governing practices that reflect both key characteristics of local governance and more diverse perspectives on political change in contemporary China.

Two types of neighborhoods emerging through marketization and urbanization are of particular interest to this book: middle-class neighborhoods and newly urbanized neighborhoods. Urban middle-class neighborhoods are gated communities of owner-occupied apartments, whereas newly urbanized neighborhoods include urban villages (chengzhongcun) and relocation communities (huiqian xiaoqu) produced by the expropriation of rural land for urban development projects. Urban villages house those who manage to stay in their original village house sites (zhaijidi) despite expropriation of their farming land; relocation communities are new urban residential compounds established to house displaced farmers who were relocated from their home villages due to the loss of both their farming land and house sites.

Unlike most societies where urban gated communities are usually exclusive to a small group of wealthy people, gated communities in urban China are the major form of urban middle-class housing consumption (Zhang 2010; Tang 2018). There have been heated discussions on whether and to what extent the rising Chinese middle class are expected to become a driving force for liberal democracy like their Western counterparts. Some scholars argue that the Chinese middle class can enhance its political prospects by participating in neighborhood governance and that the gated residential space can contribute to the emergence of a more autonomous middle class (Read 2003, 2007; Tomba 2005; Rocca 2013). This expected autonomy, to a large extent, has been associated with homeowner activism observed in Chinese cities, especially among middle-class homeowners. The development of homeowner activism has accompanied a rights defending (weiquan) discourse, which emphasizes upholding the legal rights and interests of property owners and occupants.

The marketization of urban housing introduced not only business actors into the process of developing and constructing urban housing but also market actors such as real estate development companies and property management companies. Most housing disputes in urban middle-class neighborhoods have been caused by the infringement of homeowners’ rights by developers or property management companies (Read 2003; Tomba 2005; Shi and Cai 2006; Cai 2008). Since the 2000s, increasing homeowner activism has been observed nationwide in the rising frequency and severity of conflicts between middle-class homeowners and property management companies and associated real estate developers, with protests led by self-organized homeowner associations